This was the view from my hotel balcony for three days while I was helping host the 2013 European Pensions Industry Summit in Montreux.  Your envy can now subside - I saw very little of it - spending long days with around 300 people in business suits, wrestling with a  crisis assailing the industry.  

At a glance it seems an impossible puzzle to solve...  There are more of us, living longer - yet our pension funds are finding it harder to find investments which will grow sufficiently strongly, to make the money we need later.

Nouriel Roubini (nicknamed Doctor Doom for predicting the Global Financial Crisis) hosed us down with a torrent of chilling economic facts - for an hour.  Ranging from currency and trade imbalances, systemic failures, sick banks, stagnant politics, to the risk of nuclear war.  A lovely, personable man face-to-face - but don’t hire him for a children’s party - unless it’s Halloween.

For those trying to provide us (we lucky few) with our incomes in retirement, the result of that bad news and uncertainty can be boiled down into three big effects : low interest rates, sluggish growth and an increase in (doubtless well-meant) regulation which is putting up costs, at the same time as discouraging some forms of investment.  Investing and getting great returns is now less certain.  And yet great returns are what we need for the larger number of us living so long.

And if you want to know why the industry would bother, then consider that these folks will want you (or your employer) to chose their pension product.  And your employer might want to offer you a better pension plan, the way they offer some workers health benefits or cheap gym membership.  

So after a period of throwing their hands up, and saying “I can’t make the maths work” - allowing Defined Benefit pensions (where promises are made about your retirement income level) to shut and their wholesale replacement with Defined Contributions pensions (where no such promise is made) - now the search is on for a sustainable third way.

Regulation often stymies that - still designed for an old fashioned environment of either DB or DC, and little else.  Lack of experience-sharing is also a culprit.  There are many different systems across the West, with solutions and ideas which might be useful, applied elsewhere.  The hunt is on now to find and share those solutions.

About time too.  Since the conference I have heard professionals admitting that the old two-horse (DB/DC) system was way out of date, long ago - but comfortable, and relatively effective when the Western economy seemed to be doing effortlessly well.

A final observation - more made in conversation than in conference...

Governments - lambasted here for their tight or unimaginative regulation - have a role to play, think most.  Not as a provider of a catch-all, or catch-the-poorest, state pension - but certainly in sponsoring a default or benchmark pension fund (like NEST in the UK) by which other pension schemes may be measured - to keep the industry competitive and honest.   

Maybe it was Stockholm Syndrome - but I must say I did come away from this gathering impressed at how hard these people work - and how prepared they are for harder work in the future. 


The EPI Summit was organised by Marcus Evans 
http://www.marcusevans.com

I guess I’ve simply got saddle-sore.  After a quarter of a century of commuting into various newsrooms, reading in and climbing steadily towards a daily deadline - it’s time to get off the news cycle.

This is the first of an occasional column (very occasional by the way) in which I’ll follow my nose instead and write when I wish.

That news cycle has become very short hasn’t it?  From rumour to history in a matter of hours.  Exhilarating stuff a lot of the time - a grind sometimes too.  I certainly welcomed breaks from the day-to-day : the special investigations and documentaries...

Technology has allowed us to add value in a richer and far more efficient manner compared to when I started off in journalism with an electric typewriter, rotary-dial telephone and a list of the usual suspects in my contacts book.  But more frequent deadlines can drag daily journalism back to the superficial.

I guess I was first personally impacted by a breathless tightening of the news cycle with the advent of continuous news stations in Britain in the late 80s.  I saw the Death Knocks come around quicker and crueler.

Generalising somewhat, the previous routine was to cover a shooting or bombing with witness reports first, of course, then interviews with local politicians, priests, friends - before gradually circling in on the victims’ families for comment - all of which could take two or three days.

You could often drive into the village of the family concerned, or city street, and see a line of hunched, respectful, murmuring locals queuing up at the ‘right’ doorway.  The glimpse just giving you enough time for your stomach to hit the floor before you swung open the car door - wielding a mic, a taut face and a trite introduction.

The news cycle was so tight once that I turned up at a victim’s house before she even knew her son has been shot dead.  I still don’t really know how it could be possible, but this was the era before mobile phones.  Instead, as she held her keys in her hand, on her doorstep and in the inflamed orange glare of the street lamps, I was the messenger.  Except I didn’t quite do that.  I scared her half to death anyway by asking her “If she had heard some very bad news...” and suggesting she get a relative around. 

Then I got back into my car and soon heard her visceral howls of pain.  

I haven’t had to carry out a Death Knock for a few years now.  Needless to say I don’t miss them.  Quite understandably I was treated with contempt for my intrusion.  Or hatred.  Or stunned silence.  Sometimes I spent long hours counselling.  But perhaps the worst was when I was treated with warm hospitality and courtesy when I knew the families had better things to do.

I particularly remember a bright blue-eyed, black-haired girl, about ten years old, who brought “the man from the BBC” a cup of tea and selection of biscuits while I talked about her father’s death with her Mum.  She smiled shyly and with a touch of excitement too.

I knew that soon after I left, as dusk fell, that she’d remember again that her Daddy wasn’t coming home.